Francis Bula on city-building, development and moving from journalism to civic politics

When veteran city hall and politics journalist Frances Bula announced she was running for city council last week, as part of the OneCity party, it caused quite a stir.

“It certainly shocked a lot of people in the Vancouver political scene on Sunday when it started to break,” said CBC journalist Justin McElroy, speaking with Stephen Quinn on the This is Vancouver podcast on March 10. 

“After more than a decade and a half writing about various issues, it takes a lot to completely surprise me, to hear something that makes me fall off my bike,” wrote The Georgia Straight’s Editor-in-Chief Nathan Caddell. “That happened over the weekend when I first learned that Frances Bula, perhaps the face of civic journalism in this city, would be running for city council with OneCity.”

For some, it was welcome news.

“We're lucky good people still choose brutal politics,” declared the headline of Bula’s friend and journalist Adrienne Tanner’s opinion piece for the National Observer.

Others, like the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano, marked it as “the end of her career in civic journalism.”

She’s taken it all in stride, and this week Vancity Lookout sat down with 71-year-old Bula while she finished up “the last freelance piece I’m going to be filing for a while” (a piece on the state of post-secondary education in B.C. for University Affairs magazine) to hear about what she’s witnessed over decades of reporting on and in Vancouver and what that tells us about the city’s history, present and future.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Julie Chadwick: You've seen a lot of city changes in your time as a journalist. What stood out for you in terms of how the city's changed when you think about it from a multi-decade period of time?

Frances Bula: Oh, God. I mean, there are so many different directions I can go with that, because when I started at the city in 1994, the center-right party, the Non-Partisan Association, had been in power forever. It looked like they were going to reign until the end of time, and city hall was dead. I was the only person there, except for cable TV, who was filming the whole thing. And I remember my husband saying, “Yeah, it's too bad you weren't here in the ’70s and ’80s, people used to be marching down to city hall all the time. It was like the hot, happening place.” 

And by the time I started in ’94 it had died down. Nobody thought cities were doing anything interesting. Vancouver city hall was just seen as this terminal, boring black hole. They were dealing with the usual things — development is always a big part of what cities have to do, because land use is their primary regulatory function. And then homelessness started to creep up, and I got interested in it.

At that point, Vancouver had a not very serious homeless problem. There were about 500 people who were mostly in the shelters every night. Toronto was in terrible shape, but Vancouver was better. Anyway, I got the Atkinson Fellowship to study housing and homelessness for a year, and that became something that I then became interested in for the rest of my life.

Then the drug issue came to the fore. It became a big thing that the city was trying to grapple with how to deal with. Then you saw the NPA being swept out by the left-wing COPE party, because people felt like the Downtown Eastside and the drug issue were getting really bad, and that the center-right party wasn't dealing with it. 

There are so many changes I could talk about. The big political divide used to be NPA center-right and COPE hard-left. Those two parties. Now what we've seen is there's been this evolution where it seems like every election there's like five new parties.

Certain issues have really surged to the fore. The problem of toxic drugs and drug overdoses is still terrible, and homelessness is still a huge issue. Housing was an issue in Vancouver for a long time before the rest of the country. I always felt like federal politicians just never bothered doing anything about housing, because they were like, “Well, only Vancouver is having the problem, and they're way off over there and there's some weird thing going on there that we don't understand and don't care about.” 

And then in the 2010s when the housing problems spread to the rest of the country — or actually, it was really more like 2020 and on — and then all of a sudden everybody goes, “Oh shit, that's what Vancouver was dealing with. Oh my god, we're in trouble.”

Every little town has a housing problem and a homelessness problem now. The spread of the issues has been incredible. So the political parties, they've all fallen apart, and then they're having to deal with the new campaign finance rules, which I'm running up into as a candidate.

There's been a shift in the issues. It's really been about 10 years since Vancouver felt really good about itself. Vision was in power for 10 years and the last two years, from 2016 to 2018 were kind of very sour. Everyone was sick of Vision Vancouver by the end. And then there was the Kennedy Stewart council that was elected, and it was four different parties and an independent mayor, and people just felt like it was really chaotic, that every time you went to council, it was like the roulette wheel was spinning on how any kind of vote would go. 

Now you have this new party that sprang into being, and everybody was very hopeful they were going to bring this coherent, middle-of-the-road approach. And what’s going on with Ken Sim and ABC, It's fairly obvious to everybody that things aren't going well, and people feel like this isn't what we voted for. Things have really gotten off track.

Julie Chadwick: I’m curious what you think in terms of the city balancing the need of developers versus residents and the need for family housing that seems to be a huge challenge for the city right now.

Frances Bula: OneCity wanted to have me and I wanted OneCity because both of us are feeling like we want a different kind of conversation about housing. William [Azaroff], the mayoral candidate I'm running with, said we need something between single-family homes and towers like right now, the city sort of often splits into those two predominant forms.

There's a desire to articulate how we are going to do this without being ultra-NIMBYs or articulating a position that seems to advocate for clear-cutting the city and putting up nothing but concrete towers. It's hard because everybody says they want something in the middle, but exactly where that middle is is going to be a negotiation, and it's going to be tricky to figure out, and not everyone's going to agree.

For some people, it would be, “I'd really welcome a small apartment building in my neighbourhood on a single lot.” And other people would be, “Oh no, that's so big and it's going to overshadow the bungalow next to it.” OneCity is very focused on how do we welcome newcomers into the city? How do we make space for them? So it's how you figure out how you can accommodate them in existing neighbourhoods without being brutal about it.

Julie Chadwick: You did some excellent reporting recently around the cancellation of a supportive housing project in Kitsilano. What are your thoughts on supportive housing?

Frances Bula: I'm a huge advocate of supportive housing. I think the people running it are basically saints, you know, because these are people who are dealing with everyone who no one else wants. Kids out of foster care, people straight out of jail, people who are mentally ill, people who are drug users, old people who maybe have cognitive issues. They are being asked to take care of everyone, and not great staffing. 

Every nonprofit housing operator I've talked to has said having only 40, maximum 60 people is the best. This idea of these towers that really came from Rich Coleman when he was the Liberal housing minister, his idea was, “We'll just build 14 towers, we'll put 1400 people in them, and then the homeless problem in Vancouver will be solved.”

And ever since then, there's been this push to maximize the number of units on every site. But realistically, it's really hard for those housing operators to manage that, and it produces a lot of community backlash when you want to put in a bigger building like that. I know BC Housing wants to maximize what they can get out of every site, but really they have to be smaller, more manageable sites, and they'll run better, and the public will hopefully be more accepting of them. But we're seeing a real backlash against supportive housing all through the province.

For a while, it was going in, and no one said anything. And now, every time the province proposes something, some group arises, and they've cancelled two or three projects already because of that. 

Julie Chadwick: Over the arc of history that you've seen in your time in Vancouver, what would you pull out of it that would help us understand more about the current situation and the future?

Frances Bula: I guess a few things I've learned — housing is a really difficult issue to tackle because it takes so long to get anything done.

The most effective, quickest, successful policy initiatives I've seen are with transportation, like when New York shut down all of Times Square and turned it into a pedestrian area, or they started with the congestion tax. New York imposed a congestion tax on anyone coming in a vehicle, and it has proven to be unbelievably successful. Everybody loves it because it made the streets quieter and the people who have to drive can get around more easily.

But housing is really tough because it takes so long. There's some housing projects that Gregor Robertson announced in 2018 that haven't been built yet. So it takes a really long time. It's unbelievably expensive. It uses up a lot of political money and political capital.

I think one of the reasons it didn't get attention for a long time is that politicians don't get any kind of public reward for it. When they put money into a transit line or a filtration plant or something more public, millions of people benefit from it and understand, "Oh, the federal government did this great thing," but when they put money into housing, it's so expensive, it takes however much to house, like 50 people. Those 50 people move in, they don't even know who built the housing or where it came from. They don't have millions of people coming through their house every day going, "Isn't this great that the federal government did this?"

It's just a kind of a hard political sell. We've had 30 or 40 years where the federal government ended their support for social housing, and they didn't really put anything in. And the housing plan was kind of gliding with no fuel for a long time, but it was still in the air, and then it crashed. And now everyone's like, "Well, why can't we fix this in 30 minutes?"

Obviously, there's been such a big change since COVID too, and the fentanyl overdose situation created a whole different dynamic in cities about, “Are our downtowns going to survive? How do we maintain public order, given the kind of shift in the way people behave in public?”

The city is definitely dealing with some new issues and then old issues that have become worse and seem more intractable. 

Julie Chadwick: How has your journalism informed what you're going to do with politics? You're coming to it with such a different set of knowledge and skills.

Frances Bula: Obviously, things that I covered as a reporter I got interested in, and I think part of me running is that I got frustrated, because no matter how many stories I wrote about, “this is a great thing,” nothing was happening with it. I'm very interested in community land trusts, which Toronto has really developed as a sector and the city's really helping them out, and they're just starting off here, and don't get much support from the city or the province at this point. 

I've always been interested in tiny home villages. I wrote about the one in Duncan a few years ago, and I've seen them in Portland and Seattle, and again, the city's been reluctant to have anything like that and I started to feel like I could maybe have a more direct impact on seeing the things I care about put into action.

My advantage is I know stuff about the city already, but I don't know as much as people think. There are all these people who the last few days have been, “Oh yeah, she knows where everybody is buried, and she's gonna know exactly what to do.” 

Oh my god, slow down everybody [laughs]. I know what hundreds of much more knowledgeable people than me have told me over the years, that's what I know. I don’t know everything, but I am not going to have to go through the same learning curve as other people about what certain things mean.